garbled

adjective

gar·​bled ˈgär-bəld How to pronounce garbled (audio)
: made unclear or confusing : distorted or mixed up
a garbled message
garbled speech
… scientific cranks—those folks who concoct garbled and grandiose pseudo-scientific theories …Robert W. Wilson
A garbled group of syllables came over the speaker.Tom Clancy
But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day drive from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled fading memory.Herman Wouk
Since the algorithm relies on the absolute accuracy of everything it has read to build the file, garbled information could lead to any number of mistakes.Paul C. Schuytema

Examples of garbled in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Accents are vague, and lines are garbled and weakly deployed. Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 28 Aug. 2023 Employing machine learning, the researchers reconstructed garbled but distinctive audio of what the participants were hearing. Lucy Tu, Scientific American, 15 Aug. 2023 The researchers hope to make the garbled playback crisper and more comprehensible by packing the electrodes closer together on the brain’s surface, enabling an even more detailed look at the electrical symphony the brain produces. Lucy Tu, Scientific American, 15 Aug. 2023 Meanwhile, as in the earlier film, albeit in somewhat more garbled fashion, there are flashbacks to earlier events. Dennis Harvey, Variety, 11 July 2023 By the Nineties, Pat Robertson could get onto the New York Times bestseller list with a garbled account of a conspiracy involving the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 21 Sep. 2022 Lee’s contested and subsequently revised four-week study of one camp in the Kalahari in the 1960s becomes, in Suzman’s garbled rendition, the history of our species. Daniel Immerwahr, The New Republic, 24 Mar. 2021 By all accounts, the Twitter Spaces event was a debacle—the livestream was garbled and chaotic, forcing the campaign to relaunch from a different link, losing half the audience in the process. Jeff John Roberts, Fortune Crypto, 25 May 2023 Google's reCaptcha, the dominant tool around the world for implementing these checks, came out with a version in 2018 that uses machine learning to silently check humanness behind the scenes and phase out the garbled, blurry strings of letters and grids full of traffic lights. WIRED, 29 Sep. 2022 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'garbled.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1757, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of garbled was circa 1757

Dictionary Entries Near garbled

Cite this Entry

“Garbled.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/garbled. Accessed 27 Sep. 2023.

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